English philology faculty

CONCLUSION
Perhaps the most important factor contributing to the controversies surrounding Sterne's work is his provocative and persuasive humor. Some critics have seen this quality of Sterne's writing as an end in itself, a viewpoint represented by Wilbur L. Cross, who contends that Sterne “was a humorist pure and simple, and nothing else.” Other critics, including those of the English Romantic movement and most modern commentators, perceive more profound motives underlying these works, with a number of recent studies contending that Sterne's humor derives from an acute awareness of the ultimate evil and suffering of human existence and that each farcical antic is an allusion to a grim truth. Whether or not it is justified to place Sterne in the philosophical company of modernists who blend comedy and despair in their works, critics are now largely in agreement that Sterne is an exceptional case of an eighteenth-century writer whose works are particularly sympathetic with the concerns and temperament of twentieth-century readers.As additional volumes of the ongoing work were published, more critics echoed the sentiment of Burke. Owen Ruffhead, reviewing the third and fourth volumes in 1761—and who, like many at the time, assumed Tristram Shandy to be the actual author of the work—directed his criticisms directly at the author: “We must tax you with what you will dread above the most terrible of all imputations—nothing less than dullness. Yes, indeed, Mr. Tristram, you are dull, very dull…. Your scharacters are no longer striking and singular…. The novelty and extravagance of your manner pleased at first; but Discretion, Shandy, would have taught you, that a continued affectation of extravagance, soon becomes insipid.” Despite this critical backlash, Sterne's most famous work remained the subject of favorable scholarship throughout the nineteenth century, with prominent figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt complimenting many elements of the books.Similarly, since the Renaissance, the numerous allusions to music in literature and the references to the opposition between harmony and discord had generally been used as metaphors of the passage from dramatic situations of conflict, tension or disorder to a final return to peace, order and resolution. The traditional literary metaphor of musical harmony aimed at the eventual overturning of discord and consequent restoration of order – the order that one assumed was to be found in nature. One expected to find in the mathematical proportions of music a model that might provide a better understanding of man himself (Finney 21-22). In such a system of thought, discords were used as signs of disorder that had to be superseded and overcome by some necessary return to harmony. Literature was full of images and metaphors of musical strings that had to be tuned, which suggested an analogy between the human body and the universe.